How colleges and cannabis companies are working together to create pot training programs

The cannabis industry is in desperate need of trained workers as legalization looms

Al Unwin (left), associate dean of Niagara College's School of Environmental and Horticultural Studies, and Denzil Rose, a student in Niagara College's Greenhouse Technician program are shown in a handout photo. The southern Ontario college says it will be the first to offer a postsecondary credential in the production of commercial cannabis.THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO-Niagara College

British Columbia’s Okanagan College has a mandate to serve the interests of businesses in its community. So when licensed cannabis producer Sunniva started building a greenhouse and manufacturing facility in the region, the company reached out to the school in the hopes of forming a partnership. Sunniva knew it would need to hire 200-plus employees for their launch in 2019 and they wanted them specially trained — people who understood the plant biology, the production cycles and the business of cannabis.

Normally, Okanagan creates new courses using information provided by the government to determine what kind of workers are needed and what classes should focus on, but in the fast-moving cannabis industry that wasn’t an option. Instead, the college created an advisory board with their partners to hear straight from the companies themselves — Sunniva and Crop Health, a local crop consulting service — what skills they needed.

The result is a plethora of cannabis-based courses being rolled out at Okanagan this fall, including everything from Cannabis Business Fundamentals to Growing Your Own Cannabis to Pest Management for Cannabis Production.

“Right now we’re forced to hire outside the industry and then train people ourselves,” said Dr. Tony Holler, CEO of Sunniva. “That’s costly, it takes time.”

“We reached out early on to Okanagan College and said listen this is going to be a big industry in the future, the college should start an educational program,” he said. “They’re trying to support the industry, which desperately needs it.”

Right now we're forced to hire outside the industry and then train people ourselves. That's costly, it takes time

Tony Holler, Sunniva CEO

Okanagan is just one of a number of post-secondary institutions across the country that have been working closely with the cannabis industry to provide training programs ahead of the legalization of recreational marijuana in October.

The new sector is expected to create thousands of jobs in the coming years, and the hiring spree has already begun to heat up. As of July of this year, cannabis-related searches on job site Indeed were four times higher than last year, while job postings for the sector have more than tripled. The kinds of jobs are evolving, too.

“Production … was really something that we had to focus on almost a full calendar year ago to make sure that we had the platform to be able to fill the demand,” said Jordan Sinclair, vice president of Canopy Growth, which has built relationships with a number of schools, most notably Niagara College in Ontario.

“The next wave that comes has got to be the sales teams in order to satisfy all these accounts…. Then the retail teams get layered on top of that and that’s kind of where we are in the process.”

Among the schools that are focusing on delivering more business-oriented classes is Ontario’s Durham College, which has seen 350 students complete a two-day intensive course called Medical Cannabis Fundamentals for Business Professionals that it launched in 2017.

It is now expanding its offerings to establish a cannabis industry specialization program that launched this fall and is comprised of six courses. The part-time studies program is meant for people who have already completed a diploma or degree program in business and will be delivered both in class and via interactive online simulcast.

It will include classes such as Importing and Exporting Cannabis and a Cannabis Capstone Course in which students will produce research on an aspect of the industry. (Students must be 19 years of age to take the course — anyone caught lying will get a refund, but lose their administrative fee.)

Durham has partnered with Ample Organics Inc, Molecular Science Corp, Cannabis at Work, GrowWise Health and CannaInvestor Magazine to help build their program, and is aiming to eventually integrate cannabis units into other general degrees, such as engineering, nursing and human resources.

“There can be in some cases this perception that, ‘I’m going to go and work in a cannabis company, and what do those people do all day? Well they must be smoking and getting high and having lots of fun,’” said Debbie Johnson, dean of the school of continuing education at Durham College.

What they're looking for are people who are really serious about working in the industry

Debbie Johnston

“This is one of, if not the most highly regulated industries in the world and what they’re looking for are people who are really serious about working in the industry.”

Knowledgeable retail sales people are also in demand, something that has fuelled a partnership between retailer Fire and Flower, which says it is planning to open more than 40 stores in Western Canada following legalization, and the College of the Rockies in B.C.’s Kootenay Rocky Mountains.

Jesse Cheetham, vice president of human resources at Fire and Flower, said that his company sees selling product as only one facet of the retailer’s job — they also need to educate customers about cannabis and the industry as a whole.

“With cannabis it’s always been taboo to talk about, to use openly, and now we as an industry need to make that normalizing happen in a period of months. So it’s a huge gap to fill in a short time. It’s a huge responsibility,” said Cheetham.

Carmen Rochwell-Hoover, an instructor at the College who had a background as an herbalist, helped develop the school’s Cannabis Retail Specialist Program, along with Fire and Flower and other partners.

Books about marijuana lay on a table in the office of University of Vermont pharmacology professor Wolfgang Dostmann in Burlington, Vt. The College of Medicine is offering a new class on the science of medical marijuana.AP Photo/Lisa Rathke

She said her own experiences taking cannabis education classes made her aware of some of the blind spots in existing programs.

“(The programs I took) were definitely production and facility oriented which was not what I saw as being valuable to those front-line workers who were going to be out there.”

The 26-week certificate launched in May and will be available four times a year — the next course runs in October, just before legalization — and includes a practicum placement.

While Fire and Flower will not be able to launch a planned internship program until legalization is official, other companies with a background in the medical marijuana field have already begun offering students hands-on opportunities.

We’re all responsible for building the industry

Jordan Sinclair

Canopy Growth and Ontario’s Niagara College, for example, have already run co-op placements for students.

“We’re all responsible for building the industry,” said Canopy’s Sinclair, who is a former teacher and has taught some cannabis classes himself. “We don’t have an infinite talent pool of people who know how to build in the cannabis space, we have to build that capacity ourselves. It’s almost like self-preservation.”

On Sept. 5, Niagara College also welcomed the first cohort into its Commercial Cannabis Production program, a graduate certificate program that the school says is first post-secondary credential in the production of cannabis.

The school said the year-long program — which requires students to already have education in a related field — was “the result of extensive consultation that Niagara College has conducted with LPs over the past several years.”

The program will offer students hands-on experience growing cannabis in a 900 square-foot facility that can hold 150-200 plants.

“The unique nature for us has been in the licensing requirements to grow plants on our campus,” said Alan Unwin, associate dean of environmental and horticultural studies.

With cannabis it's always been taboo to talk about, to use openly, and now we as an industry need to make that normalizing happen in a period of months

Jesse Cheetham

Niagara said it received 300 applications for 24 spots for the program’s first cohort.

With the young industry changing by the minute, institutions will need to work closely with employers to keep the curriculum up to date.

Bradley Poulos, an instructor for Ryerson University’s business and cannabis course, expects he’ll have to change up his lesson plans on the fly, especially with legalization looming.

“The first people that are involved aren’t academics sitting in an ivory tower somewhere, these are people who are involved in the industry,” he said. “It’s a very fluid world. Anyone who is involved with it will have to live with the fact that they will need to keep learning.”

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